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grabcocque

So, basically Flash lives on because advertisers are still looking for a way to track us without our permission.

Gee thanks.

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All closed technology, on some level, exists to perpetuate coercion. This is the thesis of the free software movement.

I think that's a rather extremist view.

have you read his profile?

It's also true. Even at the most benign level, non-free software exists to coerce you into running unverifiable code on a machine you own. Less benign non-free software coerces you into paying for a license, signing an EULA, participating in a botnet, etc.

> All closed technology, on some level, may be used to perpetuate coercion.

Maybe this way?

There are surely many examples of closed technology that isn't phoning home. The problem is that you don't get many garanties.

I don't think coercion is necessarily limited to phoning home.

You can still track users just fine without Flash - the VPAID spec calls for allowing cross-domain "Friendly" scripting access, which is horrible for users.[1]

The only problem with Javascript adoption was the availability of Javascript based ads and support for this VPAID style tracking.

[1] http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/VPAID_2_0_Fina... - VPAID 2.0 spec, section 8.1.3: "The VPAID ad unit is rendered within a friendly IFRAME (FIF) and can access the DOM of the page in which the player is rendered."

They don't need Flash to track us. Google does it just fine without it.

The difference is whether or not you can detect it effectively.

It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS.

>> It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS.

I thought you just put a video tag and point it at the URL of a video file. What else is missing? ;-)

100% Browser support. And if you consider the only people that click ads are probably running IE 4, then browser support is pretty important.

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